The short of it is that I have been running these meets for 5 years now here at virtualmeet.net. This site is an ungodly mess of a heavily modified open source forum and a bunch of scripts which semi-automate pushing the meets from upload to final results. This is no wonder given that I threw it together very quickly to get us going. It works, but it is no foundation to build further upon.

So, for longer than I care to admit, let's diplomatically call it two long years, I have been working on reimplementing the site from scratch to create a more robust platform. It is now 66,322 lines of mostly tested code strong and is starting to approach a state where it is usable. The plan is to turn the old site into a read-only mode within a few weeks and to migrate all content to the new site for internal beta testing open to all members. Once the bugs are ironed out (and there will be bugs!), the new site will go public to replace the old site and meets will resume with a vengeance. We should know better when that may be in a few weeks, but I am hoping to at least get some action going before the summer. Whether there will be a Gathering at Toffe's Gym this year is also still not decided though please PM or e-mail me if anyone would like to attend one.

If you have any questions on this, please ask. :) I also sent out an e-mail about this to all members on January 18th, not sure if you got that.

PHP for the web site with the plumbing (video handling, code deploys and so on) in Python peppered with the occasional shell script. The persistence layer consists of PostgreSQL fronted by aggressive Memcached usage, with Redis used for auxiliary data which does not need as strong persistence guarantees and which benefits from fast writes (such as session data and various counters). I just ported the front-end to HTML5 with fallbacks for browsers with sketchy support, and am starting to really look forward to playing around with using HTML5 video with Flash as fallback. Add Javascript and CSS and that's about the stack right there.

The model layer is developed in TDD style with all tests being ran on every push to the git repository on the server by the Jenkins continuous integration server. If all tests pass, the code gets deployed via my little deploy bot which can deploy the code to an arbitrary number of servers in a decently atomic fashion. The code itself is structured into applications with actions tied to a role based access control system, so I can deploy features selectively and quickly turn things off should that be needed. The site itself is ran in OpenVZ virtual containers (currently two web servers fronted by the Haproxy load-balancer with round robin, one database server, one Redis server and one Memcached server) on a single dedicated server. This ensure that I can scale things out decently quickly should that ever be needed.

That's it in a nutshell. I am the first to admit that a big reason for why getting this far has taken its time is that I have put a lot of effort in getting the base in order. As a single developer effort, the only way to keep this together is to do it properly. Let's see where it goes from here... there is still a lot of work to be done and the switch over to the new site is merely the first step. A lot of the meet stuff will not be in there immediately either.

Will, that would be an honor. Also, I suspect that yours is a fine age to start a lifting career at. Gone are the reckless days of youth where one is apt to pile on too much on the bar and good morning to parallel come what may... Powerlifting is a sport you can stay active in for a long time if you manage to keep healthy so one kind of ties into the other. :)

Will, that would be an honor. Also, I suspect that yours is a fine age to start a lifting career at. Gone are the reckless days of youth where one is apt to pile on too much on the bar and good morning to parallel come what may[/u]... Powerlifting is a sport you can stay active in for a long time if you manage to keep healthy so one kind of ties into the other. :)

Hey Warren, good to hear that someone noticed that I haven't shipped yet. ;) It's still coming along one night at a time. Getting the meet layer up and humming is mostly what's taking some time. The original plan was to ship the base site and roll out the meet results, videos etc. a bit later, but that feels a bit like delivering the patient without the heart in place... There's two weeks more in March, I'm gunning for that but let's see.

Actually, I am very much planted in mainland Finland 10 minutes outside of Helsinki. Toffe's Gym on the other hand is at our summer cottage further up north on an island, but even that is not farther than a few rock throws away. I'd say that that article has a lot of valid (and some not so valid or outdated) facts intertwined in a narrative which makes for a somewhat black and white picture. I certainly see where they are coming from and recognize a lot, but I also don't quite recognize it as the same environment I'm living in or the values I hold. All this said with the diplomacy of someone who studied social anthropology and spent two years in East Asia learning a bit about how richly different the cultures of our world are. Stereotyping is the easy way out in my humble opinion. :)

Somewhat, do you notice a behavioural change (in yourself or others) with the changes in number of daylight hours? In this country there's a noticeable shift towards misery during the winter months. This winter was very mild, yet this did little to raise spirits. I think the darkness is the real culprit.

The light is back and the island with its usually very productive summer coding season is approaching fast. I am secretly hoping this will boost me to a August release. I'm sure everyone here have an educated guess of how much I am longing for finally starting the next chapter... enough said, better get back to the coding. Again, thanks for your never ending patience! :)